Posted on November 13, 2020 by admin
5000 lbs moved- check. But now, the garage was FULL. There are a few options when you run out of space because you have too much stuff: Get rid of some stuff Organize your stuff Make more space so you can spread out more. Obviously organizing stuff is for people who are smart, so I chose to do the first and third options. I sold a valve grinder and a brake lathe which I’d acquired as part of the deal in Saugus, which removed about 3-400 lbs and about 5 cubic feet of machine. Good enough. However I still had
Posted on November 12, 2020 by admin
Welcome back to the never-ending saga… here we go again. With the epoxy disaster complete, the next thing on the extremely long list was to prep the machines in Saugus for moving. And by prep, I mean excavate. Excavate? Yes, Excavate. The machines were literally buried under about 6 feet of stuff, including hundreds of carburetors, at least 50 truck starter motors, at least 200lbs of NiMH and lead acid batteries, at least 20 small Briggs and Stratton small engines, super old welding gear, about six massive generators, and more heavy stuff. The two photos below were taken after about
Posted on October 31, 2020 by admin
Part 2 of the Austinshop never-ending saga. Previous part here. With money down on the machines, I had to find somewhere to put them. Luckily, I just moved into a place with a garage! But, the garage was kind of a disaster. The previous tenant had left a bunch of stuff in the garage, and additionally pretty heavily damaged the garage door on his side. Luckily, cleaning up his stuff wasn’t too bad, and his security deposit went towards buying a new door. The garage, trash removal in progress. Its also worth putting in a picture of the place I
Posted on October 29, 2020 by admin
September was a complete ‘unmitigated disaster,’ as Bayley would say. The highlights of September disaster included briefly losing all of my soldering irons and moving into an apartment which hadn’t been cleaned in 10 years. At least its over now, and now we plow into October. Lots has happened. First up, lets backtrack a bit to the events of late August, when I heard about an estate sale from a friend of mine, Nick B. Estate sales are interesting- it is sad that you’re buying the livelihood of the dead, but at the same time, we all will end up
Posted on August 15, 2020 by admin
Hey y’all, welcome back to my boring blog. This week’s post: LOOKUP TABLES, LOOKUP TABLES, AND MORE LOOKUP TABLES. The IPM current setpoint lookup tables are notoriously annoying to generate because the situation really demands a three-axis table. Speed and throttle position are the obvious axis, but the lookup table is also a function of bus voltage because a higher bus voltage requires less field weakening for a given speed and throttle position. Field weakening more than required is OK, but reduces efficiency for a given power output. Not a huge deal though. On the electric bike, I charge the
Posted on July 28, 2020 by admin
A few months ago Aaron and I made a nice maple cutting board. It turned out well, and therefore deserves a blog post. I haven’t really done much woodworking, this was definitely my first real woodworking project since high school. All woodworking starts from an average-looking wood blob. However, this block started out special: it was curly maple, which will give the final cutting board a very interesting 3-d looking pattern. Additionally, this wood was special, coming from a tree grown on the farm owned by John Quincy Adams, which is cool. The boards were cut to length and then
Posted on July 21, 2020 by admin
Um, what???? Yeah…. I sawed a lithium battery in half. With zero fires. Pretty insane. I’m basically a ballr. The need for sawing a battery in half arose while working on the electric moped. FSAE had several 1.6kWh packs which had weird issues, namely that they *occasionally* would short out to their cooling plates. Not hard shorts, just a few hundred kohms- but this is enough that they would slowly discharge, and more importantly, fail the rigorous isolation tests in FSAE rules. Therefore, these packs were not suitable for racecar duty, which meant that they were generously donated to the
Posted on July 8, 2020 by admin
Once or twice a year, something special happens. Something you don’t normally see. Something so incredible, its worth writing a blog post about: The members of MITERS go outside. Hear Ye, Hear Ye: its time for the legendary, certifiably insane, MITERS BOATING ADVENTURE. That time of year when we use our big brains to make magical machines which defy physics by not sinking and occasionally exhibiting forward motion. Usually, every boating adventure revolves around a “main event” of Dane’s creation, such as the Doom-Winch or the boat named Three Wave Rectifier. However, this year a different scheme was proposed: the
Posted on June 5, 2020 by admin
Today Aaron and I made a shed/greenhouse! Last year, Aaron bought a little cheapo greenhouse to store his boat stuff in, which promptly collapsed under the weight of the New England snow. The original greenhouse consisted of a metal frame (which broke) and a plastic covering, which we decided to reuse. We started with a simple CAD model. The dimensions were largely set by the plastic covering. The width was slightly under 10′, and the height was 7′. How high to make the walls was a source of debate. The original plan was to go with a low 40″ wall,
Posted on May 30, 2020 by admin
A while ago I bought a bunch of cheap 128×64 OLED screens off eBay to attach to random things. They were cool but I never really progressed to using them in actual projects. But in this time of Corona quarantine, I decided to give the screens a go again. It is pretty easy to find arduino libraries for these screens. I wasted no time porting one of the simpler libraries for use on an STM32F401, mostly just changing it to use the mbed I2C calls. This proved to be actually somewhat annoying, but eventually with some aggressive scoping and reading
